Excerpt from Jose Canseco’s New Book “Bright Lights, Big Baseball Stadium”

You can knock any ball out of the park. But you look at your biceps and you see that they’re lacking. You want muscles, the same way that young teenage girls want personal shoppers. You had a personal shopper once, but she didn’t like it when you ran around Saks Fifth Avenue with your shirt off.

So it’s come to this. Hank and his secret stash. You stop studying your credit card statements. You look at the needle and you stick it in your arm and you feel your muscles expanding. You know that you’re a better baseball player, a better man, and that you can stop anyone’s heartbeat with a single thought.

You’re unstoppable, kid. Who cares if you’re growing older?

Your friends think you’re out of control. But the nice thing about steroids is that you can get new friends. Glitzy people who will nod their head and tell you that your deltoid muscles are the Eighth Wonder of the World. And the locker room groupies arrive more frequently. You feel impotent, but you don’t care. They’re caught in the moment. And besides there’s that penis pump you borrowed from Number 34.

Steroids will cure disease. Steroids are your true compadre. Good thing you can operate as an athlete. Because the last thing you need is some bullshit allegation that you’re not a team player.

The Erotomaniac

Somewhere between Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Fanny Hill is My Secret Life, an eleven volume, one million word memoir written by “Walter.” The entire text has been placed online and is searchable. Other interesting facts: The books were owned by Aleister Crowley, Harold Lloyd, and Josef von Sternberg. “Walter” was, in all likelihood, Henry Spencer Ashbee, who collected thousands of books in a London bachelor pad and left 1,600 volumes of erotica to the British Museum. On the sex and reading front, Ashbee seems to have found the best of both worlds. From Vol. 9, Chapter XIII:

We used at times to lay in bed reading baudy books. Then I would gamahuche her, and she liked the lingual exercise continued almost directly after her spend. A few minutes’ repose only and I’d fuck her, then we’d go on reading. Sometimes she’d read until suddenly she’d frig herself, laying back, grasping my prick hard with one hand, even hurting it sometimes, with eyes closed, more frequently looking me full in the face eyes wide open, with a wonderful voluptuous expression, till her breath shortened, her lovely thighs and belly quivered, then her eye lids drooped till her body was quite tranquil. � Then with the remark, � “We are beasts,” � our reading was resumed.

Related: Odd Books, “a home for the oddball and offbeat in literature,” which includes pages devoted to Frank Harris (another womanizer whose five-volume MY Life and Loves was published with several photographs), forgotten romantic writer Amanda McKittrick Ros (acclaimed by the likes of Twain, Lawrence, Huxley and Powell) and big-time crank Webster Edgerly, whose strange notions on health may have inspired to T.C. Boyle. Edgerly went by the psuedonym of “Dr. Everett Ralston.” By a twist of fate, today (January 4) is Ralston Day!